From 2 December 2021 to 5 February 2022
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
Mr. Djub
“I made my first collage in 1983. I was 14, I was a punk, I made fanzines. It was a time when all the layouts were made by hand… In France, the punk and Situationist legacy was already well established. Collage was therefore a natural practice, but used above all politically, in the spirit of the slogan. Collage has a fascinating history. Some trace it back to Charles Dufresny in the eighteenth century. For my part, I feel an emotional bond with the Dadaists Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, and of course with the Surrealists, particularly Max Ernst: that is the precise period I am most attached to. Then I like the way the Art Brut people moved things on by combining techniques, going from paper to objects to tell their own stories. Collage is more a shared practice than a movement as such; it is a reality. On the other hand, one state of mind binds collagists together: the Stakhanovism of the whole business. They are all scalpel fanatics who want to make a new meaning, a mischievous subversion, spring from foreign material. And the real point in all this is how far you are able to push the exercise. I also think one has to distinguish collagists from computer addicts and digital assemblage. I work only with newspapers published between 1840 and 1880, for the sake of consistency. One of the advantages of collage is precisely its lack of reference points. In that sense no dogma confines its practice, so it has no defined school, and I love that, as someone who claims to be self-taught, having been thrown out of the national education system at 16. Ernst said: ‘If it is the plumes that make the plumage, it is not the glue that makes the collage.’ In art, nothing can be reduced to a technique.”
Mr Djub lives and works in Paris (France). He made his first collages in 1983. Claude Roffat, recognised and respected for his work with the French singular artists and founder of the benchmark review of Art Singulier and Art Brut L’Œuf sauvage, exhibited the artist in his Paris gallery at the close of the 1980s. From 2010 Mr Djub made his collage technique more complex, deciding to create solely with “old papers”: engravings printed between 1840 and 1890 in popular periodicals covering current affairs in art, culture and politics, and news stories. Seeking the truth of a paper that is fragile and generally hard to preserve, his creations reject any gestures (such as reprography, colour rebalancing or ink highlighting) other than those imposed by a pair of scissors and a scalpel. Mr Djub is also Djubaka (music programmer for the national radio station France Inter) and one half of the activist duo Anne & Julien, who founded the art project HEY! modern art & pop culture in 2010.
Text: Anne Richard
Further reading: Les Mondes Promis, illustrations by Mr Djub, texts by Rosita Warlock (éditions Rackham).
www.galerie-lesyeuxfertiles.com
instagram@mr_djub
www.heyheyhey.fr
Collages on nineteenth-century newsprint and, exclusively, colour collages. Mr. Djub was at the gallery on Saturday 11 December 2021 and again on Saturday 8 January 2022 to introduce his elixir, Myrthillium, and to tell a few chronicles and strange stories: those of the Explorer, the Thinking Bird and the Levitatrix.
Articles in Télérama Sortir and Beaux-Arts Magazine. Owing to its success, the exhibition was extended until 5 February 2022, alongside the exhibition of drawings by Jorge Vigil, A Dreamer’s Itinerary.
Artist: Mr. Djub